Blumhouse almost gave its 2018 horror hit Truth or Dare a meta sequel after being inspired by the young cast’s offscreen friendship.
Jeff Wadlow, who has also directed Kick-Ass 2, Fantasy Island, and the upcoming Blumhouse movie Imaginary, was speaking to Variety about Imaginary when the topic of a Truth or Dare follow-up came up.
Truth or Dare Sequel Looked to Take a Leaf Out of Freddy’s Book
The original film saw a group of friends become entangled in a deadly demonic variant of the traditional Truth or Dare game. It was a box office success on a modest budget, which is very much the Blumhouse way.
Wadlow revealed how seeing the group mixing during a trip to Big Bear gave him an idea after talking it out with star Tyler Posey.
“They had become great friends and were going on trips together, hanging out in Big Bear,” he said. “They had this idea: ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if ‘Truth or Dare’ happened to us while we were on vacation together, the actors?’ The joke became that the sequel should be called ‘Truth or Big Bear.’ I thought that was kind of a brilliant idea.”
“So we wrote this script — ‘Truth or Dare IRL’ — and it begins with Markie and Olivia, Lucy and Violett’s characters,” Wadlow said. “They’re in this scene, and it feels like our ‘Final Destination’ kind-of ‘Truth or Dare’ scene, and Markie starts laughing in the middle of it. You hear, ‘Cut!’ and the director walks on the set, and we do the ‘New Nightmare’ treatment where we reveal that Lucy and Violett are still friends. They’re going to go on this trip with the other actors from ‘Truth or Dare,’ with Tyler, Landon and Sam. Everyone who was in the first film, they’re all buddies, and we find out what happened is the writers of the first film had researched a real demon. Just as Calux can haunt a game in the film, he’s now decided to haunt a movie in the real world. It was scary and surreal and funny and played a lot with subjectivity.”
Wadlow had written a meta script with Michael Reisz, Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach for the sequel, and production was due to begin during quarantine, which ultimately led to it falling through.
“I got a call from Jason,” Wadlow said. “‘Would you be willing to move into the hotel on the Universal lot with all the actors from ‘Truth or Dare’ and the crew, and quarantine with everyone and make a movie during the height of the pandemic?’ I was in, and we started prepping it. There’s this one cabin on the Universal lot where they’ve shot a million things — we were going to take over that cabin. But I think they started to realize that the health and safety risks involved at that moment, and also the cost implications of basically not letting people leave, would mean everyone was on overtime for the entire shoot, and they pulled the plug on it.”
Wadlow doesn’t think there’s any chance of the sequel happening now.
“Too much time has passed, but I think that would have been a lot of fun to make, and the audience would have dug it.”
The original movie starred Lucy Hale (Pretty Little Liars), Tyler Posey (Teen Wolf), Sam Lerne (Monster House)r, Violett Beane (The Flash), and Hayden Szeto (The Edge of Seventeen)
